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Floor Speech
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Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, among the bills in the funding package that was signed into law yesterday was the State and Foreign Operations appropriations bill. And while people are understandably focused elsewhere, I want to take a moment to talk today about what is in the so-called SFOPS bill and why it matters because, simply put, this bill will save lives all around the world. It will strengthen our alliances and partnerships at a moment when global instability is at an alltime high. And, crucially, it will make Americans safer here at home.
As ranking member of this subcommittee, I saw in realtime the destruction and devastation wrought by Donald Trump's illegal dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Estimates are that more than 760,000 people, including 500,000 children, have died over the past year since American assistance suddenly vanished-- 760,000 people. Worse, millions more are expected to die in the next 5 years if the current trend continues.
So it is in that context that this bill is essential. It is proof that there is still broad bipartisan support for America showing up in the world, not just with tanks and guns but with food and lifesaving care and economic assistance. And we do that not just because we are the indispensable Nation and that is the right and moral thing to do-- although that would be enough--but also because projecting power in all of its forms is smart, it is strategic, and it makes us more safe and more competitive.
In this bill, there are vital investments in global health, humanitarian aid, and economic and development assistance. There is more than $9 billion for global health programs to help to fight HIV/ AIDS, malaria, TB, and polio. The funding also supports vaccination efforts that the administration tried to eliminate and strengthens maternal and child health programs.
The bill includes close to $7 billion for development programs focused on economic resilience, education, water and sanitation, and disaster mitigation. And there is a reason why we have funded these programs for decades. Yes, our partners want them. Yes, they employ tens of thousands of Americans. But more than that, these programs benefit our national interests in unique ways. For instance, it is because of USAID's war legacy work in Vietnam that we share a strong security partnership today. It is thanks to our disaster risk mitigation programs in the Pacific islands that we have as much access to the region as we do.
So it is not as if we just invest this money and hope for the best. This is not charity. This is not charity. It pays off over years and decades.
This bill also rejects the administration's efforts to retreat from multilateral institutions like the United Nations. It ensures that we can pay our treaty dues to international organizations, restores voluntary funding for organizations like UNICEF, and fully meets our commitments to multilateral development banks that focus on economic development.
Relatedly, the bill includes billions of dollars in funding to allies and partners across the globe, including those in the Indo-Pacific and Eurasia who are working to counter Chinese influence and Russian aggression.
Now, I want to be clear: This bill is definitely not the bill that I would have written if it were up to me. There are steep cuts to really important programs, and we are asking our diplomats and our partners to navigate a riskier world with fewer resources. The cuts to humanitarian assistance are especially disappointing, and they are the result of the administration effectively shutting down the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, slowing assistance for those impacted by conflict, and reprioritizing funds for its own agenda. Our international broadcasting grantees are also experiencing significant cuts even as they try to provide essential information and services in Ukraine, Iran, and across the Indo-Pacific.
And I want us to understand that what happened in the spring around DOGE and USAID--a lot of people are not tracking some of these funding areas, but, for instance, this is about getting our message out in Ukraine, this is about countering the Government of China's propaganda in the Indo-Asia Pacific, and this is about people in Iran having access to the internet through VPNs that we helped them to get.
And so some of these programs--if you are just a tech guy and you have been assigned to find things to cut and you read a line item and you say: 75 million for what? VPNs in the mid--what is that? That is what this is. All of these programs serve our national interests.
That said, there was nothing inevitable about this bill. We are here today, a year on from the wholesale evisceration of the American foreign assistance enterprise, enacting a bipartisan law because Members on both sides were committed to preserving this enterprise. So I want to thank Senators Graham, Murray, and Collins as well as Representatives Diaz-Balart and Frankel for their partnership in negotiating the bill. It was one of the toughest negotiations and most important negotiations I have ever been involved in.
And I also want to thank the incredible staff here in the Senate who worked tirelessly to get this done. On the Democratic side, that is Alex Carnes, Sarita Vanka, Kali Farahmand, and Drew Platt, and on the Republican side, Paul Grove, Paul Denaro. This would not have been possible without all of you.
And now the hard work of implementation and oversight begins. We can appropriate as much money as we want, but we need experienced people to administer these funds. So, to that end, while rejecting the administration's request to close USAID as an independent Agency, this bill sustains investments in our diplomatic workforce that provides new hiring authorities for the State Department in order to properly manage the additional assistance. And on oversight, we have closed loopholes and added new transparency requirements so that Congress can better track the use of funds and ensure that they are being spent as intended.
Just last week, Secretary Rubio committed to faithfully implementing this bill, and now it is on all of us to work together to make that true. There will be a lot more work to do in the months and years ahead to rebuild American foreign assistance, but this week marks a very important first step.
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